I'm trying to create a class that uses cURL to make requests to the Twitter API. I've done some research on object oriented programming in PHP, and I can't quite figure out how this should work. The following code returns NULL:
<?php
class twitter {
public function curlQuery($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, True);
$json = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$array = json_decode($json);
return var_dump($array);
}
}
$object1 = new twitter;
$object1->url = "http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?include_entities=true&include_rts=true&screen_name=twitterapi&count=2";
$object1->curlQuery($object1->url);
?>
Also, I'm a little unsure when to use $this->variable
vs $variable
in a PHP class. Shouldn't all variables mentioned in an class be referenced as $this->variable
? Why would you ever not want to reference the variable of the current object?